Kim Philby entered Rhodesia as effortlessly as Horne had predicted. At Salisbury Airport he spent half an hour with an exquisitely polite young Immigration officer who, after granting him permission to stay three months — renewable on demand — spent most of his time detailing the pleasures and relaxations of Rhodesian life, most of which struck Philby as being of a depressingly outdoor nature.
The officer had seen at once that Philby was a gentleman. He accordingly recommended to him the best hotels, the best clubs, the best spots for fishing and golf and sightseeing. Visitors from Britain, he explained, were normally granted honorary membership of even the most exclusive clubs, for an Englishman who ventured into the ‘rebel’ camp was treated almost as a resistance hero — living proof that the old links with Imperial loyalty still held.
After their interview, Philby took a taxi to Meikle’s Hotel in the city centre and checked into a large old-fashioned room, ate a wholesome English dinner by himself in the hotel restaurant, then drank himself to sleep with the duty-free Scotch he had bought on the plane up from Jo’burg.
He had arrived in the southern continent by a route of his own choosing, despite the fact that Pol had provided him with a first-class ticket on South African Airways direct to Johannesburg. Philby had allowed Pol to see him off at Geneva Airport; then at the last moment had cancelled his reservation and transferred to a Swissair flight for Rome. There he had picked up a British Airways VC 10 on to Nairobi, where he had waited five hours for an Air France flight to Johannesburg.
Throughout the journey he had carefully avoided even the most casual conversation, while handsomely exploiting the free drinks served on the first-class decks and at the duty-free bars during stop-overs. But never once did the old skills and instincts desert him, and by the time he was being checked, rumpled and rheumy-eyed, through South African Immigration at Jan Smuts Airport, where they seemed only interested to know if he were carrying a copy of Playboy, he was certain he was not being followed.
For over the past few months Philby had come to face an unpleasant truth. He did not trust Pol. He admired him, he was amused by him, he even liked him; yet behind that grotesque, giggling, clowning exterior, the Frenchman was one of the few people whom Kim Philby had found to be totally, unashamedly wicked.
In his long and varied career, Philby had worked for many odious masters. He had served them all faithfully, stealing, betraying, killing, while always fearful of being betrayed or killed himself. At the same time he had connived to save his own skin, as well as enjoying the spurious hope that someday he might be called to the aid of Mankind. So far he had survived, and now the part of Mankind that he had been chosen to help was the Black Man in White Africa. Help the old porter who had carried up his bags and bowed without a word as he accepted Philby’s enormous tip. Help the half-naked children who romped in the dust round the shacks along the road from the airport; the placid workers he’d seen riding on their rusty bicycles from the tobacco fields, while the Europeans drank long drinks on long chairs in the setting sun and talked about adultery, bankruptcies, bridge, their children’s schooling and the price of liquor.
Philby had convinced himself that he’d come to Rhodesia to help change all that. He also knew that it would take time. London had made it clear they weren’t going to rush him. But it wasn’t London who worried him. It was Pol. Philby knew that without Pol, London could never have arranged his escape from Russia. But now, mortgaged to the Frenchman and his gang of mercenaries, Philby felt far less at ease than he had done under any of his former masters in Soviet Intelligence; for the Russians had always represented a professional, impersonal elite; while Pol was something else altogether. Pol was an amateur, a freebooter who hired his services to the highest bidder. And Philby was uncomfortably aware that in his own case Pol had received a substantial payment from the funds of the British Secret Service — which meant the luckless British tax-payer.
The real problem was, just where did Pol’s responsibility to London end? Pol was a man who liked to play the field; and from various incidents during their stay together in Switzerland, Philby was now convinced that the Frenchman was having dealings with certain Arabs. Arabs who had the same motives as London, only stronger? International Arab revolutionaries with limitless petro-dollars to finance whatever operation they had hired Pol to execute? And in this new scheme of things, where did Philby fit in? For Philby was still officially London’s man. He had been sent into Rhodesia as a low-profile, long-term agent. A sleeper. While Pol and his new paymasters — in Tripoli, or Algiers, or Baghdad — might have no use for sleepers. After all, the anti-White struggle in Southern Africa was very much a thing of the moment.
At the same time, Pol might easily decide that Philby, like the miserable Maddox before him, had become an embarrassment; and Philby had no illusions about how Pol would react.
Philby had always been careful not to inquire too closely into the Frenchman’s immediate or long-range plans. Both discipline and experience had taught him never to question the tactics of a superior, though there were moments when he bitterly resented not being consulted. But what troubled him most was a detail which, during the dramatic, furtive planning with Pol in those last weeks in Moscow, he had foolishly, even wantonly, neglected. Before fleeing from Beirut, he had left implicit instructions that if he — Harold Adrian Russell Philby, only son of the great St John Philby — should ever be
